Just Like Old Times

The video below is from the vault; it was uploaded to my YouTube account in the middle of 2008. It’s the first teaser trailer for a fantasy short I did called Twisted Thicket. It’s the only thing I’ve shot on actual film so far. I’m including the teaser here because it features a score that I wrote for the project.

I ran into my choir teacher from high school when I was prepping to shoot Twisted Thicket and asked if the school choir would sing on the soundtrack. My mom took the temp track of the parts I recorded, transposed it onto sheet music for me (I can’t even read sheet music anymore), and the choir sang it beautifully. It was an awesome experience.

I used to write music all the time. My family is very musical, we were even a family band when I was in high school. My parents moved us to Austin, Texas to chase the dream, and for a year we played our originals in coffee houses. My dad on guitar, my sister on mandolin, myself on stand-up bass, my mom on various percussion instruments, and we all sang. Oh! There’s a video. My sister recorded us doing one of our signature songs in the living room a couple of years ago, way past our heyday. Apologies if you’ve seen this before.

How crazy is that action? The family band about 13 years after we left Austin. The reason that all of this is on my mind is because I’m at the phase of post on Ep6 where I’ve been dropping in temp music as reference for our composer, Suede. At the end of act 2 is a beat where I wanted a very specific shift in direction to a character’s musical theme. I couldn’t find what I wanted temp-wise, so I pulled out the guitar, plugged the Lightsnake into the computer, and played the reference track in myself. It was great. I always loved making music. I just loved making movies a little bit more. So when I decided to buckle down on this web series, I decided not to split my energies and I stopped writing music. I’m not saying that whipping out the guitar and laying down one temp track has made me re-evaluate things, just that the effect of getting exactly the music you want underneath a scene can change everything and elevate the whole project.

In other news, I have a couple more scenes in Act 3 to appropriately temp-score and then I have a rough cut of Ep6 completed. It was finally complete enough last night for me to show it to Eliza, and she really liked it. I was really worried about it, I‘ve been too close to it for a month now. Having another pair of eyes on it made me see it a little more clearly. This episode is going to be so awesome. Now onto all the time intensive post work: VFX, sound effects, sound sweetening, color correction. There’s a ton yet to do, however this time, people other than myself are tackling a majority of it before I do the final mix and polish. Weird times.